Political Science 318
Strategy and Ethics in Election Campaigns
September 24, 2004

Assignment #3

This assignment asks you to evaluate the position taken on a single prominent issue by both the major candidates in your assigned Senate race. You need to address three related questions.

1. Exactly what position is each candidate taking on the issue? You should illustrate the position taking with supportive evidence from campaign speeches, newspaper articles, or television advertisements.
2. How is the candidate representing constituents on the issue? This question involves both the type of representation provided and the particular individuals being represented.
3. Is each candidate doing a good job of representing constituents on the issue, i.e., is each candidate’s representation on the issue good or bad? In answering this question, focus assessing each candidate’s representation from a normative but non-partisan perspective. For example, liberals find it hard to disagree that conservative Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch often does a good job of representing many of his constituents in Utah.

The first step in this assignment is meeting with the other students to your particular Senate race. As a group, you need to choose the 6 most prominent issues in the race. Then, divide up the issues, with each person taking one.

Your arguments should be well-reasoned and clearly explained, with supportive evidence. You can strengthen your arguments by incorporating material from class discussion and the assigned readings, as well as evidence from the race and state itself.

Make sure that you pay attention to the following suggestions:

• Complete the assignment early enough that your group leader can post your work to the class web page.
• Avoid partisan bias as much as possible.
• Feel free to improve your evaluation by using links to video clips or other presentational material that can not be part of assignments submitted on paper.
• After posting your work, check the word count. Going over the 500-word limit will lower your grade for the assignment.

The Honor Code covers this assignment. You should pledge your work by including in the assignment a statement that you have followed the Honor Code in completing the assignment (to save words, you can include this statement on a separate page that is linked to the main page for your assignment). Your page should contain appropriate in-text citations for any sources used. The detailed information for each citation should then appear in a bibliography on another web page (that is linked to the page containing the text of your assignment). The assignment is due at the start of class on October 8. In other words, you should post your page by 2:30 p.m. on this day. Assignments posted more than 10 minutes after the scheduled start of a class period will be considered late. Assignment grades are lowered by 10 points (out of a total 100 points) for each 24-hour period (after the start of class) that they are late.